Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Olgivanna had selected Wesley Peters for Svetlana. He was tall, handsome, charismatic, with a tragic past, and was completely under her control—the perfect candidate. Everyone at Taliesin enjoyed watching the progress of the increasingly “whirlwind” courtship. The fact that Svetlana and Peters were sexually attracted to each other was palpable to everyone.

  It didn’t occur to Amin to warn Svetlana. He saw in her a person of raw need. “She coexisted with pervasive uncertainty, inconsistency, and insecurity about what her future held.” He found her “soft-spoken, attractive, and a pleasure to be with,” but she would occasionally withdraw into some private recess where she became inaccessible.16 Having read her books, he knew her history—the shattering loss of her mother to suicide; the arrests, imprisonments, and murders of her relatives and friends. Amin thought that perhaps Wes could make her happy, though he doubted it.

  By the second week, Wesley Peters invited Svetlana to dinner at Trader Vic’s in Scottsdale. Now he opened up, talking about the first Svetlana, his beloved wife, and the tragic car accident for which he felt responsibility. Although he had been a widower for twenty-four years, he spoke as if the accident had just occurred. He listened as Svetlana talked about her childhood, her broken marriages, the death of Brajesh Singh. As the restaurant closed, they were still talking.

  Svetlana said, “I like you very much,” and suddenly it seemed they were talking of staying together. As Svetlana remembered it, Wes said: “Oh, I’m very glad. I’m going to tell Mrs. Wright.”17

  On April 4, just three weeks after her arrival at Taliesin West, to the shock of many of her friends back in Princeton, Svetlana and Wesley Peters were married. In fact, what friends did not understand was that this man was irresistible to her precisely because he proposed marriage and not a casual affair. She may have failed three times at marriage already, but Wesley Peters seemed “so clean, so decent, and so sad.”18 She expected to entwine her life in his.

  A joke went around Taliesin. It was said that Svetlana should call her next book Only Three Weeks.19

  A handful of guests were invited to the afternoon wedding, which took place in the small living room at Taliesin. None of the guests were informed why they had been invited until they arrived. Mrs. Wrigley of the vast Wrigley gum fortune was there,20 as was Ed Murray, the editor of the local newspaper, Arizona Republic. By keeping the wedding secret and assuring Murray of the scoop, Olgivanna was calculating that his sense of indebtedness would serve her in the future.

  Olgivanna introduced Svetlana to each of the guests triumphantly: “My daughter, Svetlana!” Svetlana was suddenly frightened, but her worry was that she might merely be a substitute for another woman and would be expected to remain in her shadow. How could she “ever fulfill everyone’s desire” to take the first Svetlana’s place?21 Her father’s voice was still in her head: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” But it was too late for doubt. She did not want to believe that anything about this precipitate marriage could possibly be amiss.

  Only one guest, Alan Schwartz, represented the bride at the wedding. Svetlana had called Schwartz at his office and said:

  “Alan, remember when I was telling you about my brother, and you said, ‘If you ever need me, I’ll be there’?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” She said, “I need you to come here to Taliesin. I need you to come tomorrow.” I asked, “Why?” And she said, “I just need you to come. Do you have a pink tie?” So I said, “I think I have a pink tie.” She said, “Bring the pink tie.”22

  Schwartz traveled to Taliesin without a clue as to why he was so desperately needed. He was met at the airport by a car and driven to Taliesin. Svetlana was standing at the entrance of the compound beside a tall stranger. “Alan, this is Wes,” she said. She then led Schwartz to the guest quarters and asked if he wanted a gin and tonic. “I better have something,” he replied, “because I don’t know why I’m here.” He was already somewhat suspicious, having noted that, though there were phone jacks, the phones in his room had been removed. Svetlana said, “I’m getting married in an hour.”

  That night there was a huge party with all the architects, students, and guests in attendance. The only thing Alan Schwartz really remembered was Svetlana’s almost girlish happiness. “One got caught up in her impulsiveness. She’d pull you in and you felt helpless.”23 He also noted that Olgivanna Wright made sure she knew where he was every minute.

  He had been scheduled to fly out after the wedding, but Olgivanna persuaded him to change his ticket for the following afternoon so that he could stay for the party. She knew Schwartz was Svetlana’s lawyer. The next morning, she arrived in her golf cart to take him on a tour of the grounds. “She showed me where this had happened, where that had happened. She wanted to make a good impression on me, but she wanted to make sure I saw and heard only what she wanted me to see and hear.”

  Kamal Amin recalled: “The glow of the event lingered on for some time as the international media picked up the story, placing Taliesin at the center of intrigue—a favorite place for Olgivanna.”24

  There was a dimension of Olgivanna’s intrigue that would be discovered only afterward. Even as the wedding was under way, at 2:30 p.m. on April 4, a quitclaim deed was filed in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Wesley Peters had used his entire family inheritance to buy the foundation a large acreage called Hillside, adjacent to Wright’s original estate in Spring Green. Peters’s name was removed from the deed to the Hillside property. The title was reregistered in the name of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, blocking any future claim Svetlana might have to the property as the new wife.25

  It didn’t take Svetlana long to discover that her rights as a wife were a little ambiguous. According to O. P. Reed, one of the fellows at the time, it was immediately made clear to Svetlana that Olgivanna was in charge—her “sway extended into their nuptial bedroom. Somehow Olgivanna convinced Wesley and Svetlana to spend their wedding night in separate bedrooms.”26 Somewhat later Olgivanna would try to engage Svetlana in one of her “kitchen talks,” asking about her sex life with Wes, at which Svetlana bridled. “Mrs. Wright, I am not seventeen!”27

  The morning after the wedding, Svetlana moved into Wes’s quarters. Though he was the chief architect, he had only a small room with a sofa bed, a shower cabin, and a terrace. The bride took her breakfast in the communal dining room. And discovered that, now that she was no longer a guest but a member of the Fellowship, she was expected to attend morning and afternoon tea, as well as the shared noon and evening meals. Though she protested to her new husband that she would prefer some privacy, Wes had been living as a bachelor since his first wife’s death and had no intention of changing his ways. He tried to make her understand that they were now a public couple. Tour groups tramped through the halls of Taliesin, bringing in money, and some had come to see Stalin’s daughter. Wes told her she should have expected to be on view.

  There was very soon a second demonstration of Olgivanna’s supremacy. She called one night at 1:00 a.m., urgently commanding Wes to appear in her quarters to solve a crisis. The fellows were used to these calculated disruptions. For some, to be selected was flattering; but Svetlana responded, “But, Mrs. Wright, it’s one o’clock in the morning and we were asleep.” She had missed the point. Svetlana might be the wife but Olgivanna was in control. When Olgivanna shouted at her, Svetlana replied, “Don’t shout at me. I do not like it when people shout at me.”28 And hung up. Wes’s response was to ask his wife not to interfere with his work.

  The day after her marriage, she noted that Wes was not as “charmingly silent as on the first day” nor as “sad” as she had imagined. She now felt she was constantly displeasing him. He seemed to love the endless parties and wanted her there, though she thought they were a terrible waste of time. She didn’t understand that the foundation was always engaged in a desperate hunt for needed revenue. As fishing expeditions for patrons, the parties were the work. However, Svetlana had a will equal to Wes’s. She was determin
ed to be happy and to stay happy. As she put it, “I was launched upon the path of domesticity, and nothing could stop me.”29

  The first problem was that Wes was a compulsive spendthrift; this impulse, as Olgivanna had warned her two days before her marriage, reached the level of pathology. Though he was unsalaried, Wes used his numerous credit cards to buy himself new cars, dogs, extravagant gifts for the apprentices, jewels and gowns for the Taliesin women, and even presents for people he barely knew. He was on the verge of personal bankruptcy, and his family farm was about to be repossessed. Olgivanna called it a strange weakness and was expecting Svetlana to keep him under control.

  Soon after she was married, Svetlana informed her New York lawyers that she would be assuming control of her personal trust and demanded that her money be transferred to her husband’s law firm Lewis, Roca, Scoville, Beauchamp & Linton, in Phoenix. She told George Kennan, “My own financial independence has now become very important for me. . . . Please do not worry about me, I rely on Wes, on his love and his protection.”30 She planned to pay off Wes’s creditors. It would be her wedding present, and anyway, this was what an American wife would do. In retrospect, she explained, “I was trying to heal all old hurts of my husband.”31 She seemed to think that once her love “healed” him, Wes would be cured of his addiction to money.

  Despite her lawyers’ valiant efforts to dissuade her, Svetlana remained firm; she seems not to have balked when she and Wes went to the bank and she discovered that his debts amounted to half a million dollars. Her own living for the past three years had been so frugal that she had barely touched her $1.5 million advance from Harper & Row.

  People at Taliesin never took vacations, apart from their biannual weeklong treks across the country as they moved from their winter residence in Arizona to their summer residence in Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Svetlana and Wes managed a four-day vacation in San Francisco to stay with Wes’s sister, Marge, and her husband, Sam Hayakawa. From family conversations, Svetlana understood that Wes’s extravagance had been a problem since his youth. While they were in San Francisco, Wes spent every spare moment in the city shopping: buying art, tapestries, jewelry. Svetlana saw this simply as his love for beautiful objects. He bought Svetlana dresses of silver-and-gold brocade. She was amused to model them for him. She recalled with nostalgia, “I enjoyed immensely seeing him choosing clothes for me—no one had ever done that for me in my whole lifetime!”32

  For now, she was delighting in indulging Wes. When Joan Kennan visited Taliesin with her new husband, Walter Pozen, Pozen remembered Svetlana’s glee as she said, “I want to show you something.” She led them to her and Wes’s apartment. “We went into the bathroom and there were about sixteen different aftershave lotions, and she said, ‘That’s my garden of fragrance.’”33

  At Taliesin, Svetlana seemed content to enjoy her new status. Standing beside this handsome man, she was thrilled to be addressed as Mrs. Peters. It would appear, however, that she wasn’t quite the docile wife she pretended to be. At one of the fancy dinners where she was required to play hostess, she turned in fury on Wes. It wasn’t clear what occasioned the argument; paying his debts, perhaps she’d discovered he was still buying extravagant presents for the wives of apprentices. To the shock of the gathered guests, Svetlana slapped Wes’s face.34 They had been married only a month.

  It was just a tiff. In June she was writing to her friend Jamie (Donald Jameson), who was still managing her case file at the CIA, that Wes was going to take her citizenship into his own hands:

  He does know many influential politicians in Arizona and California (Wisconsin, too) both republicans and democrats, and he, too, feels that being my husband he has to worry about me and to take care of all my problems. He is a darling, indeed. What a blessing for me to have met that man!35

  Jamie was organizing her papers so she could travel to Iran, where Wes was working on construction of a $6 million project, the Pearl Palace (Morvarid Palace) for Princess Shams Pahlavi, the daughter of the shah of Iran. Wes had a romantic side, at least in architecture, and so loved excess that he’d based his design for the palace on A Thousand and One Nights. Although it seems he’d initially invited Svetlana to accompany him to Iran, in fact she never got to go on this business trip. In her chatty letter, she told Jamie that she’d seen another new state of this “blessed country.” She and Wes had driven to the town of Alma in Michigan to attend the dedication of a church he’d recently designed.

  Jamie was obviously a conduit for information about her children. She asked him:

  If you happen to hear a word about my kids from the source more reliable than the Soviet reporters, please, let me know. I’ve sent them “Happy Birthday” cards in May as usual, but I have not heard anything from them since December 1968. I understand why, but still I’d love to learn at least some news. Do you think I should just write a long letter to Katya and send it by ordinary mail. Why not? Or—better not? How do you feel about that?36

  She sent Katya an “absolutely unpolitical” book, Horses of the West. Naturally she had no answer. She had wanted to send her son a small gift too but had stopped herself. It might bring him trouble. Determined to convince Jamie, and perhaps herself, that she had the perfect marriage, she ended her letter:

  May I tell you how happy I am to have a 28-year-old son, Brandoch Peters, who is a charming young man. He is running his father’s farm at Spring Green, Wisconsin, although he is a musician by profession. I am too lucky indeed . . . best wishes from Wes.37

  Beneath her enthusiasm about her new stepson lay her ongoing anxiety for her own children. She was always looking for secure routes to information about them. When she heard that the young architect Kamal Amin would be visiting his native Egypt, she asked him to write to her friend the Egyptian ambassador to Moscow, Dr. Murad Ghaleb. Dr. Ghaleb did not reply, but by chance Amin ran into him in the elevator of the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo and immediately launched into the subject of Svetlana’s children, asking for his help in getting some information about them. The ambassador turned his back and left the elevator without a word. There was fear in his eyes.38 The KGB had not forgotten Svetlana. Svetlana had many reasons to be looking for security.

  Chapter 25

  The Montenegrin’s Courtier

  John Amarantides, an architect and a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, took this candid photo of Wesley and Svetlana at Taliesin in 1970.

  (Courtesy of John Amarantides)

  Every summer the architects and their apprentices made the long trek by car back to Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Svetlana and Wes set out in his Cadillac. Finally she had him to herself, and soon she felt the loving Wes had returned. As they traveled through the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, Colorado Springs, and the flats of Kansas and into the beautiful green fields of Wisconsin, he sang her funny songs, recited limericks, and told her fascinating stories of the history of the places they were driving through. He seemed to want her to know his America. Despite the constant business calls to and from hotels and in telephone booths en route, this drive would become a precious memory. She believed Wes would be hers as long as she could get him away from the Fellowship.

  When they arrived in Spring Green, Svetlana discovered that Wes’s accommodations in Taliesin East consisted of two rooms, with a kitchen and bathroom next to his office, an improvement certainly, but the same hordes of tourists roamed through the halls. She was settling in when she got word from her lawyers at Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst in New York that the trustees of the Alliluyeva Charitable Trust had received a letter from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation requesting a donation of $30,000, to be given annually.

  The trustees had replied that this was absolutely impossible because the Trust was small, with an annual yearly income of much less than $30,000, and the money was already committed to funding the Brajesh Singh Foundation Hospital in India. It took Svetlana a while to process this. She remembered that Olgivanna had hinted that, once married, she could t
urn over her personal assets to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, where she would live and be well taken care of.1 Svetlana turned her rage on Wes. She was paying his bills, not the F. L. Wright Foundation’s. He remarked with a sigh, “My dear, try your best to remain good friends with Mrs. Wright. Because if you don’t, we shall meet tragedy.” She was still basking in the happiness of their trip together and so decided that this money business was a misunderstanding. She also dismissed his warning.2

  The best times were her visits with Wes to his farm, which he called Aldebaran. It consisted of a small old-fashioned farmhouse, outbuildings, and considerable acreage of bucolic woods and fields. His surviving son, Brandoch, was tending it. Though he had reached the level of cellist with the Munich Symphony, Brandoch had given up music. The rumor was that he realized he didn’t have the talent to be a soloist; supposedly Olgivanna had told him he was just a “stand player. You don’t stack up.”3 It is also likely that a broken love affair had sent him back to Taliesin, where he’d seemingly fallen into an emotional paralysis.

  Brandoch now confided to his stepmother that he dreamed of owning a cattle-breeding farm. Svetlana came up with a new plan. She would pay off the liens on Wes’s farm and finance a joint agricultural venture. She, Wes, and Brandoch would be co-owners, though the money would remain hers. In other words, she would be in control. Both of “her men,” as she liked to call them, seemed excited by the idea. Privately, she thought she could be done with Taliesin. At least in the summer, Wes could work at Taliesin and live at the farm.

  Soon it was time to return to Taliesin West in Arizona, but in September, Svetlana had astonishing news to tell Wes. As she walked the fields of her new property, she had begun to feel young and vital, with a sensation of centered well-being that she’d felt twenty years back. When she visited the doctor, he confirmed that she was pregnant.